Smacking children is a decision for parents

Britain was more preoccupied last week by the news that Richard Fuld, the former head of Lehman Brothers, had reportedly been punched while exercising in his office gym, than by the age-old question of whether parents should smack their children.

And so it was that a Parliamentary amendment seeking to ban smacking outright - eclipsed by Gordon Brown's emergency statement on the financial crisis - was never even put to MPs during the debate on the Children and Young Person's Bill.

This, I have to say, came as some relief: the smacking debate is both well-worn and notoriously tricky. The clause, however, was supported by 100 Labour MPs, and its demise was lamented by Tony Samphier of the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance, who rather dramatically said that ministers should now be conscience-stricken over the "hurt that every child feels while being legally assaulted".

For once, however, I find myself in agreement with Beverley Hughes, the Children's Minister, who recently wrote that "we do not encourage or condone smacking… neither do we support a ban which would make smacking a crime".

That, she said, would mean that criminal charges could be brought against a mother who gave her child a mild smack on the hand for refusing to put back sweets grabbed at the supermarket check-out.

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The trouble with opposing, however mildly, something like the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance is that it makes one sound like some bewhiskered lunatic who staunchly believes that children should be beatable. The virulent anti-smacking campaigners always talk about "hitting" and "assaulting" children, rather than smacking, but a sharp tap on the hand of a child who is about to run across a busy road, for example, would not be my definition of assault.

I understand the arguments. I am not a smacker myself, partly because the difference in size between me and my two-and-a-half year old son would make such an action feel vaguely grotesque. Nor do I believe that - in the midst of a tantrum, say - it would do more than goad him to greater heights of confused rage. But I know loving parents who smack their children lightly as a means of disciplining them in extremis, and the idea of them being hauled off for police questioning on the say-so of some eagle-eyed stranger is deeply disturbing in itself.

We are not talking here about parents who hit their children with serious force, or to the point of leaving a mark or a weal. That is quite a different matter, and to pretend that it is part and parcel of the same thing is to defy common sense.

There is, perhaps, no issue that so clearly marks the difference in attitudes between the older and younger generations as that of physical punishment. Many adults from the generations that grew up before and immediately after the Second World War were deeply conflicted on the matter: they saw it almost as a duty by which they must shape the wilful nature of the child, and yet they felt ashamed at their own ugly loss of control in enacting it.

The result was a form of parenting that Philip Larkin memorably described as "soppy stern," and the responses of children to it were equally complex. The broadcaster Richard Madeley has recently written, with moving insight, of the painful thrashings that he suffered at the hands of his father, a man who was also highly affectionate. His father eventually stopped the beatings, with a sincere expression of contrition, and the pair remained close: the child found it in him to forgive the man.

My late grandfather was caned, aged eight, by a young female teacher for falling asleep at his school desk: he was woken by the searing pain of the blow. My father recalls crying uncontrollably - with laughter, at an illicit joke - as the headmaster belaboured him with the cane.

Neither man bore any particular grudge, but I will never forget the haunting story of a London taxi driver who told me how he was regularly beaten, in secret, by a particularly sadistic master at his school. He said nothing until he discovered that the master was starting on his little sister, whereupon he entered the room and attacked the master with his own richly overused cane.

Such brutal practices have right been outlawed, but the orthodoxy has swung to the opposite extreme. Authority figures such as teachers and policemen are now effectively forbidden from making any decisive physical response to unruly teenagers.

Hulking boys of 14 and 15, who suffer no such inhibitions when it comes to shoving around their younger or weaker schoolmates, chant the Childline number if a teacher lays a restraining hand on them. A policeman who picked a cheeky teenager up and briefly placed him in a bin in 2005, to the loud laughter of the boy's friend, was given a written warning and the boy received £4,000 in compensation.

Out of control adolescents have got the message that not only are they unbeatable, they are also untouchable. The consequences for the rest of society are frequently unthinkable.

Money (that's what John Lennon wanted)

When I was younger and of a crueller disposition, I used to take pleasure in baiting a friend who particularly admired John Lennon. The musician, I would point out, was already sitting on a stack of money when he wrote his dreamiest lyrics against materialism. "Imagine no possessions," I would trill evilly, to the tune of his most famous song, Imagine, "It's really hard when you've got millions of pounds."

Last week a Cambridge University historian, Dr David Fowler, weighed in with an even more sweeping criticism: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he said, didn't represent a genuine ideal of youth culture. "Groups like the Beatles were basically capitalists interested in enriching themselves through the music industry," he argued, critically observing that Mick Jagger had early on described himself as a musician rather than a spokesman for a generation.

When it comes to Dr Fowler's criticisms, however, I now find myself on the side of the pop stars. Lennon, in particular, had a difficult, complicated childhood without much spare cash: can anyone really blame him for enjoying the money he earned from exercising his considerable talent? And surely it is vastly preferable for Jagger to have modestly described himself as a working musician rather than some bogus "youth spokesman".

A striking number of the counter-culture activists - including entrepreneurs and publishers such as Richard Branson and Felix Dennis - have proved remarkably intuitive business people. Pop stars too, once they make it past the drugs and groupies, tend to adapt the Who's lyric "Hope I die before I get old" to "Hope I live until I'm very old, but with sufficient funds to enjoy it thoroughly and develop an appreciation for fine claret."

The reason we're in a pickle at the moment is not because of the high number of capitalists, but the number of capitalists getting high on taking extraordinary and silly risks. In fact, many of them have been behaving just like rock stars, whereas Mick Jagger has always given every impression of salting away his multiple investments cautiously and wisely. A thought: might Mr Jagger now take control of the economy, and let the money-men take their turn upon the stage?

My secret love is a hot water bottle

When I was growing up in Northern Ireland, the heating arrangements in our house were based on the medieval model: a few, powerful sources of heat dotted around the family abode, with an icy chill outside their immediate orbit.

The central heating came on only occasionally, but most of the time we - cat, dog and assorted human beings - clustered around the coal fire and the Aga, jostling for a restorative blast of fierce heat.

In the mornings, I got dressed under the bedclothes. One year, on my birthday, my grandmother bought me an electric blanket, a present that I saw as the ultimate working of technology for the human good.

Since I left home, living in flats without fires, all that has changed. The roaring heat and Arctic chills of my childhood have been replaced by the generalised fug of central heating. I have never, however, been able to get this quite right. What seems an acceptably cosy external temperature when one is getting into bed quickly becomes a stuffy Tropicana in the middle of the night. The only way of remaining comfortable later on is to fall asleep shivering, an unhappy prospect.

I have slyly begun ogling bed socks, thermal vests and furry slippers with the expression that certain men use for blondes with 38DD chests. The hot water bottles are being checked for leaks. The good news is that bedtime will be much more of an event. The bad news is that it might have to start at 8pm.